Week 6, Video 13: The 7 Happiness Sustaining Strategies

What are the determinants of a happy and fulfilling life?
This is surely one of life’s biggest questions, and a question that has interested many of our ancestors. Buddha famously gave up his kingdom in search of happiness. Several Greek philosophers (from Aristotle to Epicurus and Plato to Socrates) had their own views on what it takes to be happy. And of course, we all have our own theories about happiness too.
How valid are our theories?
Until recently, if you wished for an answer to this question, you would've been forced to base it on discussions with spiritual leaders. Or, if you were lucky, you could've based it on late-night (and perhaps intoxicant-fueled) conversations with friends and family. Happily, all that has changed now. Over the past decade-and-a-half, scientists have gotten into the act big time. We now have a pretty good idea of what it takes to lead a happy and fulfilling life.
This course, based on the award-winning class offered both at the Indian School of Business and at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin, developed by Prof. Raj Raghunathan (aka "Dr. Happy-smarts") draws content from a variety of fields, including psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral decision theory to offer a tested and practical recipe for leading a life of happiness and fulfillment.
Although not mandatory, reading Prof. Raj's forthcoming book, titled If you're so smart, why aren't you happy? can help you review and assimilate the material covered in this book at your leisure.
For Coursera learners alone, the hardcover version of the book is available for a deep discount of 50%, plus shipping and handling. You can order the hardcover for 50% off by writing to Aaron at: Aaron@800ceoread.com. Please mention that you are a student of the "coursera happiness course" in your email.
The course will feature guest appearances by several well-known thought leaders, including:
- Dan Ariely (author of Predictably Irrational and, soon to be released, Irrationally Yours),
- Ed Diener (“Dr. Happiness”),
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of Flow),
By taking this course, you will discover the answers to questions such as:
- Why aren’t the smart-and-the-successful as happy as they could—or should—be
- What are the “7 Deadly Happiness Sins” that even the smart and the successful commit?, and
- What are the “7 Habits of the Highly Happy” and how can you implement them in your life?
By the end of the course, I expect students who have been diligent with the lectures and exercises to not just gain a deeper understanding of the science of happiness, but to also be significantly happier.

教学方

Dr. Rajagopal Raghunathan

脚本

[MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back. At the end of this video we're gonna do a happiness measurement, the third and final one. Hopefully, you will see that your happiness levels have improved. I fully expected to actually since you've obviously been diligent for watching all the videos if you've gotten to this point. It's also very likely that you've done all the exercises diligently and also been open-minded. But just because your happiness levels have improved since you started the course doesn't mean that it will continue to stay improved in the future. It's gonna take quite a bit of conscious effort and smartness on your part in order to keep your happiness balloon big. One big reason for this has to do with the fact that old habits die hard. Old habits are difficult to break. As several authors, including Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis and Chip and Dan Heath, Switch have noted. Your own habits, which were the cause of your lower happiness levels have been conditioned into you for years, if not decades. For example, if you work in a typical corporation you're probably surrounded by messages that reinforce the need for superiority and more generally the scarcity mindset. Likewise, if you follow news every day, you've probably been bombarded with negative news and stories that instill a sense of distrust of others and of life itself. During this course, you may have managed to keep some of these negative influences at bay. But now that the course is over, those old conditionings may re-emerge and re-assert themselves. And it is important that you do your best to not just be aware of how various genetic and social influences might reinforce the scarcity mindset and the seven deadly happiness sins. But it's also very important that you take action to fend them off. As Jiddu Krishnamurthi, a famous Indian philosopher once said, It's no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. That is, for your happiness balloon to continue to stay inflated, you need to find ways of mitigating the happiness sense and reinforcing the happiness habits in the future, for the rest of your life I would say, in fact. Okay, so in this video I'm gonna discuss seven strategies that you can use to help you do this. The first strategy is based on something that my good friend Marshall Goldsmith, the world renowned CEO coach and best selling author of several books including, What Got You Here Won't Get You There and more recently, Triggers, told me when I spoke to him recently. I asked Marshall, why is it that even the smart and successful people, those people who are otherwise brilliant at setting and achieving their goals, falter so badly when it comes to leading a happy and fulfilling life? Here is what he had to say, listen. >> What I tell people Matt, is I'm gonna teach you a process that takes two minutes a day. It costs nothing, will help you get better almost anything. And about half the people will quit within two weeks. And you won't quit cuz it doesn't work, you'll quit because it does work. Now this is called the daily question process. Every day I have someone go through questions with me. For example, Raj, one of my questions is how many times yesterday did you try to prove you were right when it was not worth it? Kind of hard for the old executive coach not to be right all the time. Now how about professor Raj? You ever try to be right just a little bit too much on occasion, yeah? How many angry or disturbed comments did I make about people yesterday? Did I say it would be something nice for my son, my daughter, my wife, my son-in-law? Every day, I ask myself these questions. Why? To keep it in my head. Why don't people do what I teach? As you probably know, I'm the only person I would bet you've ever met that's collected feedback and published it from tens of thousands of people who have been in my classes. And I measure do they do what I teach and do they get better? Well, the people that do the stuff get better. Shockingly, the people that do nothing don't get better. Well, why don't they do what I teach? Years ago, my biggest client was Johnson & Johnson. I had the privilege of working with the top 2,000 leaders all the way from Ralph Larsen, who was the CEO, down to number 2,000. They all went to my class, and they all said they were gonna do what I taught. 98% said I would do what he thought. A year later, 70% did something, and 30% absolutely zero, nothing. And we got to interview the people that did nothing and said why didn't you do anything? They would say nothing to do with ethics, values, or integrity. They won an award that year, most ethical company in the world. They're good people. Had nothing to do with intelligence. They're smart people. Why didn't they do it? It had to do with a dream. This is a dream I've had for years, and I'm gonna predict many people listening to me have had this dream. The same stupid dream on a recurring basis for years. And it's gonna describe why in life we don't do what we should do. The dream sounds like this, I'm incredibly busy right now. Given pressures of work and home, and new technology that follows me everywhere and emails and voicemails and global competition, I feel about as busy as I ever have. Sometimes I feel overcommitted. I don't tell others this, but every now and again my life feels just a little bit out of control. But I'm working on some very unique and special challenges right now. And I think the worst of this is gonna be over in two or three months. And after that I'm gonna take two or three weeks to get organized, and spend time with the family. And I'm gonna begin my new healthy life program. And everything is going to be different. And it won't be crazy any more. How many people have ever had a dream that resembles this dream? How many years have we been having the same dream? Why don't people do what I teach? They're busy, they're overcommitted, they're tired, they're depleted, and it is very, very hard to keep stuff in our head. Why do I pay someone to call me everyday, because if I didn't, I wouldn't do it. It's hard. It's hard for me, it's hard for you, it's hard for all of us to do these things. >> So as you just heard Marshall say, one big reason why we all find it difficult assessing happiness levels is because we postpone prioritizing happiness to a later date. We tell ourselves that we will start practicing the happiness enhancing habits in a few weeks or months. This is a dangerous dream as we call it, because it can sound very reasonable to tell yourself that you'll start something once this currently busy period is over. But before you know it, the months have turned into years, and the years into decades and you are, as Pink Floyd said, shorter of breath and one day closer to death. So it's very important to make a very strong commitment to yourself, that you're going to do your best on a daily basis try to, starting today to do things that mitigate the seven deadly happiness sins and reinforce the seven habits of the highly happy. This leads me to the first strategy for sustaining happiness, which is to respond to daily questions posed by what Marshall Goldsmith calls a peer coach. A peer coach is somebody who will ask you a series of questions on an everyday basis, to make sure that you're on track to mitigating the happiness sins and reinforcing the happiness habits. Each question will begin with the phrase, today, did you do your best to. And the first question, for example is, today, did your do your best to prioritize happiness over other goals, like being right. Another question is today, did you do your best to be kind and compassionate, and so on. Now Marshall himself thinks this is such an important thing to do that he pays somebody to ask him these types of daily questions, but luckily for you and me, we don't have to pay anybody to be our peer coach. We have each other. We can just request somebody else taking this course to be our peer coach. And offer to be their peer coach in return. Of course if you're uncomfortable having somebody from the course be your peer coach, you can choose somebody else from outside Or we're gonna offer you the choice of choosing the computer to be your peer coach. Similar to how, if you remember, you received emails reminding you to eat well and move more and see better in the fourth exercise. You can choose to receive a daily reminder on the computer that asks you the questions. Later in the video, I'll will tell you how to put the first strategy into practice. Let me move on now to the next set of strategies for sustaining happiness. And in this context, I wanna mention that I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Art Markman, a colleague of mine at the University of Texas, and a brilliant professor of social psychology, and author of a book that recently came out called, Smart Change. The book is all about how one can get rid of old, unproductive habits and acquire new and productive ones. I asked Mark, why people find it difficult to break old habits like smoking or eating unhealthy and acquire new ones, like exercising ball? You'll see in his response that Art starts by telling us how our motivational system works. He then builds on that to derive some useful strategies for breaking old habits and replacing them with new ones, listen. >> Here's the way your motivational system works really quickly. Deep inside your brain, you have a bunch of mechanisms that try to engage the goals that you have. Give activity to those goals and drive your behavior and then learn habits, where they associate the environment with the behavior. And I call that system the go system just, so that you can think about it as the thing that forces you to go and do something. And then there's the stop system, which is really just a couple ounces of brain material above your eyes that is really designed when the go system engages a habit or a behavior and you don't want to perform that habit, it's that stop system that says, hey, it puts on the brakes and tries to keep you from doing that. Now, here's the problem. A lot of the goals you mentioned, which are the ones that are most persistent, those are the ones that are hard to change. And the reason they're hard to change is because we frame them negatively most of the time. I wanna quit smoking, I want to eat less, I wanna stop checking my email. The problem with that is what you're doing is saying, I've got this goal. The go system is gonna engage the goal to smoke or to check my email and then the only thing standing between me and that is that stop system and the stop system is very inefficient. It can be impaired by stress, by drugs and alcohol, by overuse. There are effects called ego depletion effects, where basically if you do something, if you control your behavior for too long, that stop system doesn't work as effectively. And so one of the very first things you wanna do is rather than frame your goals negatively, you wanna frame them positively. You wanna think in terms of actions you're going to perform rather than actions you're not gonna perform. So the question is what am I going to do instead of checking my email too often? How can I help myself to do something positive? What am I gonna do instead of smoking? What will I do with my hands? What will I do with my mouth? So, I'm replacing that behavior rather than just trying to stop myself. That's the first thing. The second thing that you need to do is to remember the environment drives your behavior, cuz the habits are really an association between the environment and the action you're gonna perform. So, one of the things that you really need to do is to influence that environment and in particular, to make desirable behaviors easy an undesirable behavior's hard. Now it seems simple, but we often do that. I mean, I lost a lot of weight years ago. One of the reasons is cuz I used to have these containers of ice cream that I would keep in my freezer and I would sit down at night in front of the TV with a big thing of ice cream and a spoon and I would just eat it till it was gone. And I made this remarkable discovery, which is you can't eat an ice cream that isn't in your freezer. So if you don't buy it, you can't eat it and those simple kinds of changes to your environment influence what you do and what you don't do. So if you wanna walk more often, then put yourself in a situation in which you have to walk more often. People who are driving somewhere, don't park closest to the store. Park at the first space you come to in the lot and walk across the parking lot. Put yourself in the situation where you have to engage more activities, because of the way the environment is set up. A third big thing is you wanna engage with people. We're a social species, we can't do anything alone. I mean, take the biggest, strongest, most powerful athlete you can think of. Put him up next to a bear. I'm betting on the bear every single time, because alone, we're really not all that impressive. But together, we're pretty amazing. And so if you think about all of the social things that influence our goals, one of them is this idea of goal contagion. If you hangout with people doing a particular thing, your goals are literally contagious. You will wanna do what they're doing. So hangout with people who are doing the behavior you want to perform and naturally, you're gonna join in and the other thing is don't be afraid to ask for help. A lot of people are a little embarrassed by the changes they wanna make or they feel like they have to do it alone, there's no extra prize. You don't get an extra gold star, if you change the behavior all by yourself. So give yourself a chance by asking people for help. Find out how did they do the thing that you wanna do and allow them to help you and then when you reach that GUI middle stage of changing your behavior, like in New Years a lot of times people will setup a resolution to change behavior. And for three weeks, they are great and then it just sort of falls off. And maybe if they had a goal to lose a certain amount of weight and they managed to stick with it, their motivation might kick back in towards the end. What do you do in the middle? One of the things you can do in the middle is actually to begin to serve as an advisor or a mentor to somebody else, because a lot of times if you've been doing something for a month or two months or three months, you've forgotten the amount of progress that you've made. If you can turn around and help somebody else, suddenly you begin to realize how far you've come and that can be really motivating. So in a lot of ways, if we change the nature of the goals that we're trying to achieve the focus on the positive one. If we change the environment, so that we're making desirable behaviors easy, undesirable behaviors hard. And if we engage with people, both by hanging out with the people who do what we want to do and learning from them and then serving as a mentor ourselves. We're doing a lot of things that we need to do, that will really help us to change behavior in a way that works with the structure of our motivational system. >> So according to Art, there are for things that can help replace old habits with new ones. These four things form the basis for the second, third fourth and fifth strategies, which are second strategy is to frame your goals in positive terms versus negative terms. For example, make your goal, I want to be a happier, more fulfilled person, not that I don't want to be depressed. And frame your goals in terms of I wanna take internal control rather than I wanna be less controlling of others. We have already done this positive framing for you in the way the daily questions are phrased as you will soon see for strategy one, but you may want to remember the importance of positive framing for the other goals you set for your self as well. The third strategy is to alter your environment, so that it's easier for you to make happiness enhancing decisions. For example, put unhealthy snacks in difficult to reach places. We already talked a little bit about this in week number four. Likewise, if you know someone who makes you feel scarcity-minded, avoid them. Similarly, if you know that being out in nature Reinforces an abundance mindset, do that. In the reference section this week, you'll find a bunch of books and movies that help me to give the scarcity mindset, and reinforce the abundance mindset. Please take advantage of them, and also please share your own set of movies, books, videos, articles, and other resources with everyone through the discussion forum, so that all of us can benefit from this. The fourth strategy involves joining other seekers of happiness and fulfillment. As you may know we have Armando Sulsa, and Kim Conga, they've already started such a community for this course on Facebook. Which has close to 1,000 members as I speak. You might want to consider joining this group. You can also sign up to receive free emails from dailygood.org. Dailygood.org is one of those initiatives that my friend Nipun Mehta, the guy who helped start Karma Kitchen, helped found, when he and his friends recognized that few media outlets disseminate good news from around the world, of people behaving in kind, trusting, forgiving ways. Personally, I find that reading an email from DailyGood helps me reinforce the abundance mindset. Particularly when I go to work early in the morning, it's a good thing to do. Of course, in addition to being part of these virtual communities, it will be great if you also considered putting together a face to face group, and met with them, say, at once a week. Perhaps you can actually start a group like that in your own city if you have other people taking this course from your city. The fifth strategy is to serve as a mentor to somebody else, that is, to help someone else figure out how to go about leading a happier and more fulfilling life. Now, even as I say this, I also have to quickly mention that please be careful in implementing this strategy. Most people don't like to get advise from other people, particularly on happiness. I think that's because most of us have our own pet theories on happiness and we don't like to have those theories challenged. So pick and choose your mentees carefully. Close friends and family are okay, but if it's a colleague or a neighbor, I would think twice. So these strategies, two through five, that I just discussed, are based on what Art Martman covers in his book, Smart Change. In addition to these five strategies that I've covered so far, I'm gonna mention two more that I think you will find useful. The sixth strategy, is to continue to be open minded to new happiness enhancing habits and exercises for the rest of your life. As you know, open-mindedness is a very very important trait, that I stressed at the beginning of the course. An openness to new experiences is hugely important in any domain it turns up, but I think it's particularly important in the domain of happiness. It's very easy to get wedded to a particular idea, ] that I am this kind of person. I'm an introvert, so I can't do certain things like gratitude exercise. Or that I'm a kind of flow person so I can't hang out with status seekers. Although some of these identities, for example I'm a flow person, are better than other types of identities, like I'm a status seeker for happiness, all identities are ultimately somewhat constraining. So the more you believe that you don't have a set identity and that it can change into who ever you need to become, that is, you give yourself the freedom to evolve continuously, the more easily you will find that you are able to adopt new happiness habits and exercises. Here is Art Martman, talking about the importance of open-mindedness for leading a happier and more fulfilling life. >> If you find yourself in a behavior pattern in which you're not experiencing much joy and fulfillment in your life, or not as much as you think you could, then there's no reason to believe that persisting in the same set of behaviors that you 're doing already, is gonna make you happier in the future. You're gonna have to make some kind of a change, if you want there to be a change in your internal set of feelings. and that is going to mean taking on a little bit of the discomfort of trying something new and recognizing, that until that new thing becomes familiar, it's gonna feel uncomfortable. You know, a lot of people who are on the closed to experienced end or don't want to try something will do it half-heartedly for too short a period of time and then say see, that didn't work, that was no fun. And of course it's no fun. The mere exposure effect that Bob Zine studied, shows that when you first encounter anything you don't like it very much. The first time you hear a song that's destined to become your favorite song of all time, you still don't necessarily like it all that much. Because it's new, and then after you hear it a few times, it grows on you. Same thing with a lot of the foods that we eat, and a lot of the people that we meet. You may not click with those things right away because they're new, but over time, the familiarity actually makes you like them better. And see you have to give these things a chance if you want there to be any opportunity to allow those new opportunities to make you happier. >> As Art just mentioned, new things, for example, practicing loving kindness meditation, may make us feel uncomfortable. So we may not be willing to give them a wholehearted try. But once we get past that initial discomfort, It's quite likely that we'll find them useful because they have been found to be very useful for many, many people in all these studies. Now if you find that you don't want to try something because it makes you uncomfortable, or because it's not me, I'd recommend taking a deep breath and giving it a whole hearted try firs,t before rejecting it. Here's Art again, one last time, expressing the sentiment in his own words. >> I tell people who are on that closed to experience end of things, that if your initial reaction to new things is to discount them just because they're new, count to ten before you say no. And ask yourself am I doing this because it's a bad idea or am I just doing it because, if I'm just saying no because it's new. And if you're just saying no because it's new, then really give yourself a chance to try it any how. >> Okay so the seventh and final strategy is a somewhat opportunistic one that kind of just fell into my lap. Just a few days back I attended a mindfulness workshop conducted by Swati Desai, a mindfulness consultant from Los Angeles, California. I really liked the workshop and I asked Swati if she'd be willing to lead a six-week long virtual, mindfulness camp for those who have completed this class, and she's agreed. Why six weeks long, and how does virtual mindfulness camp work? I will let Swati answer those questions in the next video which is an optional one. Meanwhile, to summarize, here are the seven strategies for sustaining your happiness levels after this course ends. I hope that you take advantage of as many of these strategies as you can. Before we end the video, we have two more tasks to complete. First I want you to do the final happiness measurement. You will see the happiness measurement link come up on your screen in just a minute. You know what to do, click on the link and complete the happiness measurement. Then come back here and finish the rest of the video. Great. So now, you have all three happiness measurements and I do hope that you have seen at least some improvement in your happiness levels. If you're comfortable sharing your results with us, we'd love to hear from you. With that, let me turn to the very last item on the agenda for this video which is to share with you the link to he website which has information on how to put in place the first strategy for sustaining happiness, the peer coach strategy. Soon you'll see a link appear on the screen that you will need to click on and once you do, it will take you to a website where you can find the instructions for this strategy. That's it for now. Please don't forget to watch the next video, which is an optional one, In which Swati Desai, the mindfulness consultant from Los Angeles, will give us detail on the seventh strategy for sustaining happiness. The strategy of doing a six week mindfulness practice. See you soon. [MUSIC]